From Todd Zuniga at Opium:
To celebrate the LDM’s history of violence, we’re thrilled to present an affair like never before: the All-Star Literary Death Match which will double as the release party for Opium6: Go Green! (But Save Me First). We won’t dare tell you the particulars, but expect an event like never before featuring past champions (like Kirk Read, Tony Dushane, Andrew Lam and Sam Hurwitt), the return of hilarious judges (like Jon Wolanske, Stephen Elliott, Michelle Richmond, Sean Finney and Kurt Bodden) a finale that will end in crying laughter, and (we’re not kidding when we say this) more! www.literarydeathmatch.com

When: May 10, 7 p.m. sharp
Where: Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St., SF
Cost: $10 (gets you a free copy of Opium6)
Pre-Order: Buy now or Subscribe, get a free ticket to the LDM, and avoid the line!

The death toll in Myanmar (Burma) from the cyclone is now at 22,000.

During the government crackdown in September and October, I linked to several blogs within the country that reported on the imprisonment and beating of monks and other protesters. In the wake of the cyclone, however, it’s difficult to find up-to-the-minute blogs out of Burma, likely in large part because the storm wreaked havoc with basic infrastructure. Burma Digest, however, is still posting.

A chilling post from today. (I’m copying the entirety of the post here, as the link to the post on Burma Digest is no longer active).

The Cyclone Nargis also hit Insein Prison in Rangoon. On Saturday morning at around 8 am local time, the roof of the Insein prison building was ripped off by the cyclone and a fire broke out in Hall No 1. The prisoners inside the cells called for help for hours, but prison authorities failed to show up. Finally some young jail service men opened the doors to the cells.

As prisoners ran around in the prison compound, army soldiers fired at least 30 gun shots at them from the top of the roof. At least thirty-six prisoners were killed by the shots and 70 more injured.

Read the rest of this entry »

A year has passed since three-year-old Madelein McCann disappeared from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia de Luz, Portugal. Despite the massive international campaign to find her, there have been very few clues as to what may have happened to her. Although local police action has centered on implicating the McCanns in Madeleine’s disappearance, I believe entirely, based on everything we know about the case and about the McCanns themselves, that she was abducted.

This from the Telegraph today:

Kate, 40, said yesterday that she “senses” that Madeleine is alive. She still looks frail and seems permanently on the verge of tears. ”Madeleine just feels very close. It’s more of a kind of sensation that she’s there. You try to be objective and you think it is because I am her Mum and I want to believe, but it has not changed.”

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably heard of all three of the winners of the Narrative Magazine love story contest:
First Place ($2,500) Elizabeth Stuckey-French Interview with a Moron
Second Place ($1,500) Maud Newton Conversations You Have at Twenty
Third Place ($750) Janet Burroway Blackout

Masha Hamilton was also a finalist.

Congrats to all.

Author and editor Jordan Rosenfeld (Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time) pays tribute to San Francisco’s “literary hot spots” in this article for Writer’s Digest. Jordan mentions the historic Caffe Trieste (this is the place that local writer Junvenal Acosta, among others, sometimes refers to as his office), the Mission-district watering hole The Makeout Room (home of the Progressive Reading Series), and Vesuvio. While Caffe Trieste and Vesuvio are in North Beach, Jordan’s pick for the most beloved bookstore is Green Apple (see my “found at Green Apple” posts) on Clement. Living as I do in the Richmond district, Green Apple is my neighborhood store. (I couldn’t help but give it special mention, gnome and all, in my new novel!)

SF Girl by Bay, who lives in Herb Caen’s old apartment, pays homage to the local legend Herb Caen.

Via Apartment Therapy–those literary journals piling up? Don’t know where you’ll stash another issue of your Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, Paris Review, Believer, etc.? Try the ring rack.

Via Interior Stories–could you write at this table?

Veterans of Bush’s war are committing suicide by the hundreds each month, but, apparently, our government doesn’t believe they really deserve health care. From the Chronicle today.

More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge Monday in San Francisco…He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency’s backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003…

The lawsuit is a proposed class action on behalf of 320,000 to 800,000 veterans or their survivors. The advocacy groups say the VA arbitrarily denies care and benefits to wounded veterans, forces them to wait months for treatment and years for benefits, and gives them little recourse when it rejects their medical claims.

Andrew Sean Greer’s new novel, The Story of a Marriage, is the much-anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Confessions of Max Tivoli.

The setting is San Francisco, 1953, and the narrator is Pearlie Cook, whose lyrical opening words, a kind of soliloquy for her damaged marriage, set the tone for this lovely, sensitive, thought-provoking novel. “Perhaps you cannot see a marriage. Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it.”

As with Confessions, Greer has intricately drawn San Francisco in another time. Pearlie and her husband, Holland Cook, grew up together in Kentucky in the years leading up to World War II. Now, they are adults, parents to a young boy, living far from the homes of their childhood, making a life in San Francisco’s unfashionable Sunset District, once known as the Outside Lands. Read the rest of this entry »

Time for the Progressive Reading Series! I’ll be reading with Jane Smiley (Ten Days in the Hills), Yiyun Lee (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers), Charlie Anders (Choir Boy), Laura Fraser (An Italian Affair), and Jeff O’Keefe.

With special guests- The Progressive Reading Series All Star Minstrels, and Board Of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin. Hosted by Stephen Elliott author of Happy Baby

When: Saturday, April 19, 7pm
Where: The Makeout Room- 3225 22nd Street, San Francisco, (415) 647 2888
Price: $10 - $20 sliding scale
Advance Tickets: $20. Paypal to ‘tribe AT stephenelliott.com’
Advance tickets strongly recommended. It’s gonna be crowded.

Green Apple Books is practically giving away books, people. Actually, the ongoing Warehouse Clearance Sale is coming to an end. All used books are now $2.98 or less. That’s a dollar less than a gallon of gas. A more on-point comparison: $2.98 is just a few cents over half of the five dollar penalty for bringing a book back to the library eons late. Which means it’s probably cheaper to buy it at Green Apple, because really, despite all your good intentions, how often do you take a library book back on time? All paperbacks are $1.49. Where: 248 Clement, just down the street from the Green Apple storefront.

Green Apple’s book of the month, by the way, is Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American. The Green Apple promise for their book of the month: “We guarantee this book 100% (and discount it 20% to further entice you to trust us).”

Oh, and one more thing I wouldn’t know if I didn’t subscribe to the Green Apple newsletter: Richard Bausch, author of The Last Good Time; Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea; In the Night Season; and other works of fiction has a new novel out, Peace, which involves three soldiers on a snowy night during WWII. I’m a big fan of Bausch, whose stories and novels are marked by quiet intensity admirable subtlety.